New Racials and Warlords of Draenor Dev Watercooler: Design Philosophy

Today the Blizzard devs explain some of the design philosophies behind changes in Warlords of Draenor, with additional information on Crowd Control and Diminishing Returns changes.

Some racials are getting changed--some that have hit and expertise boosts need to be changed as those stats won't exist, and others are simply too strong.

The item squish is coming because player power has really gotten out of control--Blizzard even made handy graphs showing it!

Abilities are getting removed in Warlords to reduce complexity and bloat--some are passives, others are class-wide abilities that really should be for one spec.

There is too much Crowd Control in the game. Many CC spells are getting removed, disarms are gone, and the number of Diminishing Returns categories are reduced.

After this blog was posted, which mostly covered old information, several Blizzard devs on twitter answered questions from players--revealing new information in the process. We liveblogged the highlights and organized them here because Twitter is pretty messy for this sort of information!

New Racial Information

Technical Game Designer Celestalon also answered more specifics about new racials on his Twitter, such as "Weapon Specialization racials are removed because Hit/Exp are removed." Source:

Alliance Racials:

Draenei: is now +X to your primary stat. 나루의 선물 heals for the same amount but over 5sec. Source

Dwarf: Lost and 산의 강대함. Gained Might of the Mountain, a passive which adds 2% Crit Damage. Also... A change to Stoneform: Also removes Magic/Curse. HOWEVER, it still cannot be used while CC'd. (It is still NOT a CC-break) Source

Night Elves: 민첩성 also increases movement speed by 2% passively. They also got a new passive which is quite unique... (Remember, no more haste breakpoints!) Touch of Elune, a new passive which grants 1% Haste at night, 1% Crit during the day. Source그림자 숨기 is unchanged. Source

Troll: Q: Can you tell us what exactly will be changing with the Troll racial 광폭화? A: Reduced to 15% Haste (down from 20%). Source

Undead are seeing relatively few changes. Tweaks to the scaling rate of 저승의 손길, and WotF to 3min CD (up from 2 Source

Abilities and Itemization

Celestalon and Holinka also answered questions on the ability bloat and general ability changes:

Q: Regarding removing CDs, which is likely gonna be cut for Ferals Berserk or Tiger Fury or both? A: Both of those are staying. 호랑이의 분노 is on the border between feeling like a DPS cooldown and a rotational button. Source

Q: I understand if this is too specific. Re pet-cast CC: Freeze going away? If so, room for a non-CC replacement? A: Water Elemental Freeze is staying. However, there is a minor talent that teaches Squirt a new spell that shares a cooldown with it Source

We're keeping 피의 욕망/영웅심 as the only raid-wide throughput cooldown. No more /SkullBanner. Source

We're exploring an idea where becomes a passive. Details still being worked out. Source

Yes, 속임수 거래 no longer increases damage. Yay! Source We expect it to be used for helping pick up new adds, that sort of thing. Source

Blizzard

Development on World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor is progressing well, and we'll soon be ready to enter the first phases of public testing. To help prep you for battle, let’s break down some of the upcoming changes we’re making to stats, abilities, and crowd control for the expansion.

Stat Squish

Character progression is one of the hallmarks of any role-playing game, and naturally that means we're always adding more power for players to acquire. After multiple expansions and content updates, we've reached a point where the numbers for health, damage, and other stats are so big they’re no longer easy for players to grasp. What’s more, a lot of power granularity is tied up in tiers of older content, from Molten Core to Dragon Soul—and while it was once necessary for your character's power to spike up suddenly when you hit level 70, that’s not the case anymore.

In order to bring things down to a more understandable level, we'll be reducing the scale of stats throughout the game and smoothing out those obsolete spikes, so that power scales linearly through questing content from levels 1 to 85. This applies to creatures, spells, abilities, consumables, gear . . . everything. And while that means your numbers for stats and damage are being reduced by a huge amount, the same goes for creatures' health and damage output. For example, a Fireball that previously hit a creature for 450,000 out of his 3,000,000 health (15% of its health) may now hit that same creature for 30,000 out of its 200,000 health (still 15% of its health).

It's important to understand that this isn’t a nerf—in effect, you’ll still be just as powerful, but the numbers that you see will be easier to comprehend. This also won’t reduce your ability to solo old content. In fact, to provide some additional peace of mind, we're implementing further scaling of your power against lower-level targets so that earlier content will be even more accessible than it is now.

We’re also removing all base damage on player spells and abilities and adjusting attack power or spell power scaling as needed, making it so that all specializations will scale at the same rate.

Racial Traits

We want races to have fun and interesting perks, but if some of those traits are too powerful, players may feel compelled to play a specific race even if it’s not really the one they want to play. For example, Trolls' Berserking ability was extremely powerful, and their Beast Slaying passive was either completely irrelevant or tremendously powerful, based on the situation, compared to other racial traits. On the other end of the spectrum, many races had few or no performance-affecting perks. On top of that, a number of racials that currently grant Hit or Expertise will soon need replacing, since those stats are being removed in Warlords of Draenor.

To keep racials more in line with one another, we’ve decided to bring down the couple high outliers, then establish a fair baseline and bring everyone else up to that. We’re accomplishing this by improving old passives, replacing obsolete ones, and adding a few new ones where necessary. Ultimately, our goal is to achieve much better parity among races.

Ability Pruning

Over the years, we've added significantly more new spells and abilities than we've removed, and the game’s complexity has steadily increased. We’re to the point now where players are starting to get overwhelmed, sometimes feeling like they need dozens of keybinds (in a few extreme cases, over a hundred). While the game is loaded with niche abilities that could theoretically be useful in some rare scenario, in reality, many of these are barely used at all—and in some cases, the game would simply be better off without them.

For Warlords of Draenor, we decided that we needed to pare down the number of abilities available to each class and spec in order to remove some of that unnecessary complexity. That means restricting some abilities to certain specs that really need them instead of being class-wide, and outright removing some other abilities. It also includes removing some Spellbook clutter, such as passives that we can merged with other passives or base abilities.

This doesn’t mean that we want to reduce the depth of gameplay or dumb things down. We still want players to face interesting decisions during combat, and we still want skill to matter . . . but we can achieve that without the needless complexity in the game now, and we can remove some of the game’s more convoluted mechanics while maintaining depth and skill variety.

One type of ability that we focused on removing is temporary power buffs (aka "cooldowns"). Removing these also helps achieve one of our other goals, which is to reduce the amount of cooldown stacking in the game. In cases where a class or spec has multiple cooldowns that typically end up getting used together (often in a single macro), we merged them, or removed some of them entirely.

The process of determining which spells and abilities to cut or change is a very complex one—we know that every ability feels vital to someone, and we don't take this process lightly. Even if we ended up cutting your favorite ability, we hope you’ll understand why we did so in the context of our larger goals for the expansion. Ultimately, the point of these changes is to increase players' ability to understand the game, not to reduce gameplay depth.

Crowd Control and Diminishing Returns

One other big takeaway from Mists of Pandaria is that there is currently simply too much crowd control (CC) in the game, especially when it comes to PvP. To address that, we knew that we needed an across-the-board disarmament. Here's a summary of the player-cast CC changes:

Removed Silence effects from interrupts. Silence effects still exist, but are never attached to an interrupt.

Removed all Disarms.

Reduced the number of Diminishing Returns (DR) categories.

All Roots now share the same DR category.

Exception: Roots on Charge-type abilities have no DR category, but have a very short duration instead.

All Stuns now share the same DR category.

All Incapacitate (sometimes called "mesmerize") effects now share the same DR category and have been merged with the Horror DR category.

Removed the ability to make cast-time CC spells instant with a cooldown.

Removed many CC spells entirely, and increased the cooldowns and restrictions on others.

Pet-cast CC is more limited, and in many cases has been removed.

Cyclone can now be dispelled by immunities and Mass Dispel.

PvP trinkets now grant immunity to reapplication of an effect from the same spell cast when they break abilities with persistent effects, like Solar Beam.

Long fears are now shorter in PvP due to the added benefit of a fear changing the players position.

Additionally, we've significantly reduced the number of throughput-increasing cooldowns and procs in order to further reduce burst damage.

Whether your favorite class is losing an ability or taking a hit to its CC potential, we hope this discussion helped you better understand why we’re making these changes. It’s important to remember that other classes will be getting some of their CC removed too. We think this entire package will make exploring Azeroth and PvPing a more enjoyable experience for everyone, and we’re looking forward to having you try them out when we open up the expansion for testing.

In the next Dev Watercooler, we'll explore the changes coming to health and healing in Warlords of Draenor.

Bellsdaddy2010의 댓글

Karakuri의 댓글

Talk about how racials are extremely powerfulMention Troll's berserking and even beast slayingSay nothing of the Human's free pvp trinket slot.Wat.

Cayliax의 댓글

on 2014-02-27T20:16:59-06:00

Talk about how racials are extremely powerfulMention Troll's berserking and even beast slayingSay nothing of the Human's free pvp trinket slot.Wat.

This

MrReaper23의 댓글

on 2014-02-27T20:27:07-06:00

Fail. Fail everywhere...

Numawun의 댓글

on 2014-02-27T20:34:28-06:00

I'm just wondering about the removal of CC from classes will mean removal of PVE situations that could use CC like the trash before Garrosh. Like it's definitely doable without it but the CC helps

voreo의 댓글

on 2014-02-27T20:34:31-06:00

Fail. Fail everywhere...

Yes, yes there is... in the current state of the game.

I cant wait for WoD. A lot of big game changing elements coming. A good refresh to the game :)

Im also grateful for possibly less buttons on my screen too. be able to see everything new a lot better :D

ColbaneX의 댓글

on 2014-02-27T20:36:38-06:00

Talk about how racials are extremely powerfulMention Troll's berserking and even beast slayingSay nothing of the Human's free pvp trinket slot.Wat.

Trolls defined an entire raid tier because of Beast Slaying. I believe they are far more concerned about the PvE balance between the racials. In PvP they are much closer(with Humans of course being an outlier)

toppjubei의 댓글

on 2014-02-27T20:49:05-06:00

Extremely pleased about item squish and the removal of the tons of abilities. Trying to master a new class is very frustrating with sooooooooo many buttons to push. Which one and when?

salvo711의 댓글

Arraya의 댓글

So far, so good imo. Less stress on PvP when theres like 3 ppl CC me xD

Kontwos의 댓글

on 2014-02-27T21:52:51-06:00

Talk about how racials are extremely powerfulMention Troll's berserking and even beast slayingSay nothing of the Human's free pvp trinket slot.Wat.

"Blood Fury is unchanged. Every Man For Himself, we're still evaluating. Itemization changes may mean no nerf needed."

Last bullet under horde racials; chill pvpbrah, it's probably coming.

Unstobubble의 댓글

on 2014-02-27T21:57:33-06:00

If they even touch Diplomacy, there will be blood.

If they pull the ability, it's probably worth noting that the mountains don't give back what they take.

Jokes aside, I can't see any practical reason behind touching the ability. I'd be willing to bet that they'll leave it alone.

perculia의 댓글

on 2014-02-27T22:07:30-06:00

So Blizzard decided to give specifics on a lot of racials and abilities on Twitter only--it was pretty chaotic. I've been liveblogging it all, so if you didn't see a racial before, it's probably up now.

RockwellH의 댓글

on 2014-02-27T22:31:40-06:00

about time they cut some of the cc in pvp

Worcester의 댓글

on 2014-02-27T22:36:58-06:00

Talk about how racials are extremely powerfulMention Troll's berserking and even beast slayingSay nothing of the Human's free pvp trinket slot.Wat.

This

Indeed. And let's widen the gap just a little more by adding to WotF CD.

l337g0g0의 댓글

on 2014-02-27T23:32:39-06:00

This is all great, they should make it challenging for the people CCing an opponent, not the other way. half the time your standing around stuck in a CC and it was frustrating and boring.

Just make it so the CCers have the onus of structuring their CC if they want to chain it. make it challenging for them, chained CC should come from skill and not a bunch of people just simply spamming CC abilities...

Nulgar의 댓글

on 2014-02-27T23:44:46-06:00

Someone replied with this, screenshot of these changes with more details, e.g. 야수 사냥 전문화 increases XP gained from Beasts instead of damage against them. Though that's 2 months old and may be outdated.